Thought it'd be interesting to see how much people make from adsense on their forums, considering they generally generate less money than normal sites. So, how much on average do you make from your forum per month?
My forums too generate fairly little revenues... probably about double my hosting costs, but there can be other benefits to forums and you can monetise them in other ways.
IMHO they are a lot like blogs.. Once you get a regular reader base, the ads just get ignored. But there are definately other ways to get your money's worth out of them...affiliate programs, coop or linkvault, etc.
I made so little on my forums that I don't even bother putting ads on them anymore, not worth bothering the users. in my opinion, unless you need income to support the hosting of the forums, it's probably not even worth doing. huge forums (a la sitepoint, etc) are a bit of an exception.
One of my forums grossed $34.09 in AdSense revenue last month. Another one grossed $146.04. To improve CTR/eCPM on your forums, use the Google AdSense Heat Map.
wow. that's incredibly strange. that heatmap actually differents from this one: https://www.google.com/adsense/images/placement.gif which is also official. never seen the version you posted before.
I personally think that forums do have a lot of potential to earn if they are on the right topic and are quite popular - They aren't as bad as they are made out to be in my opinion, plus like I said above they also are wuite useful as they tend to develop into quite active and thriving communities with people that actually are quite interested when the "owner" posts and I find that my members of my forum are often my biggest assets with designing thing, coding and even running things - so sometimes a forum will pay itself off in other ways.
I've worked on a forum every night for a year and a half, got a pr 5, loads of links, 1010 users, 1500 indexed pages and only get 180 uniqes a day and make average $4 a day. Not worth it unless you can get over 10000 users or over 5000 with a very active community.
I agree with Will on this one my forum topics are terrible yet it still manages to make me $200 - $300 a month, but I do actually get a lot of traffic.
Maybe it is the way the ads are layed out and I should rework them because although I get a lot of visitors and few registrations, the forum is a slow starter and bad incomer. I always thought forums were less liked by the likes of Adsense. Am I right? Low eCPM rate.